Week 2 Video 3: Is need for superiority important for success?

What are the determinants of a happy and fulfilling life?
This is surely one of life’s biggest questions, and a question that has interested many of our ancestors. Buddha famously gave up his kingdom in search of happiness. Several Greek philosophers (from Aristotle to Epicurus and Plato to Socrates) had their own views on what it takes to be happy. And of course, we all have our own theories about happiness too.
How valid are our theories?
Until recently, if you wished for an answer to this question, you would've been forced to base it on discussions with spiritual leaders. Or, if you were lucky, you could've based it on late-night (and perhaps intoxicant-fueled) conversations with friends and family. Happily, all that has changed now. Over the past decade-and-a-half, scientists have gotten into the act big time. We now have a pretty good idea of what it takes to lead a happy and fulfilling life.
This course, based on the award-winning class offered both at the Indian School of Business and at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, developed by Prof. Raj Raghunathan (aka "Dr. Happy-smarts") draws content from a variety of fields, including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral decision theory to offer a tested and practical recipe for leading a life of happiness and fulfillment.
Although not mandatory, reading Prof. Raj's forthcoming book, titled If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? can help you review and assimilate the material covered in this book at your leisure.
For Coursera learners alone, the hardcover version of the book is available for a deep discount of 50%, plus shipping and handling. You can order the hardcover for 50% off by writing to Aaron at: Aaron@800ceoread.com. Please mention that you are a student of the "coursera happiness course" in your email.
The course will feature guest appearances by several well-known thought leaders, including:
- Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational and, soon to be released, Irrationally Yours),
- Ed Diener (“Dr. Happiness”),
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow),
By taking this course, you will discover the answers to questions such as:
- Why aren’t the smart-and-the-successful as happy as they could—or should—be
- What are the “7 Deadly Happiness Sins” that even the smart and the successful commit?, and
- What are the “7 Habits of the Highly Happy” and how can you implement them in your life?
By the end of the course, I expect students who have been diligent with the lectures and exercises to not just gain a deeper understanding of the science of happiness, but to also be significantly happier.

教學方

Dr. Rajagopal Raghunathan

腳本

[MUSIC] Hi there, my friend. Welcome back. In the previous video, we talked about how chasing superiority has all these bad effects on happiness. When I talk about these bad effects on happiness to the students in my class. Many of them become a little bit uncomfortable. The reason they become uncomfortable is because they want to defend the need for superiority. Now these are of course MBA students that I'm talking about here. These are students with perhaps the most drive and achievement orientation of anyone out there. So of course, they feel uneasy when I tell them that they're better off, from the point of view of happiness, in getting rid of the need for superiority. Now, it's not that these students disagree about all the ways in which chasing superiority deflates happiness levels. Most of them understand that the pursuit of superiority is going to have a deflating effect on their happiness. But they're concerned that if they get rid of the need for superiority, they may become failures in life. Why? Because they feeling that it is the desire to be superior, the desire to be the best in the world at whatever they choose to do that fuels them, that like motivates that and energizes them to pursue achievements and success. They know from personal experience, that they routinely used the need for superiority to motivate themselves to well in their studies or at work. But the question is does the need for superiority help us succeed? Or does it, in fact, come in the way of our success? Most of us never really deeply examine this question. We just assume that the need for superiority and a feverish desire for success is a very important determinant of the success. But what's the actual relationship between the desire for superiority and success? On the one hand, there's no doubt that the desire for superiority, the desire to be better than those around us, can make us try harder at something. Imagine that you are at a gym all by yourself, and you're feeling more tired than normal as you're doing your bicep curls. There's a good chance that you may not push yourself to do the final two or three reps. But if you're surrounded by other people in the gym, and you have the desire to look bigger and stronger than them, then you're likely to not give up so easily. But what if you're not working out at the gym. But rather, on making a presentation in front of a critical and unfriendly audience, let's say. Are you likely to make a better presentation when you have the desire to be the best presenter? Here, it's not so clear. In fact, if you extrapolate from some other findings of Professor Dan Ariely, a brilliant professor of Duke University, and his colleagues. It seems that the pressure to be the best presenter might actually come in the way of making a great presentation. Dan Pink, author of the best seller Drive, has summarized some of Dan Ariely and his colleagues findings. In an RSA Animate video. Here's an excerpt from Dan Pink's presentation. >> Let's talk about a study done at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here's what they did. They took a whole group of students and they gave them a set of challenges. Things like memorizing strings of digits, solving word puzzles, other kinds of spatial puzzles, even physical tasks like throwing a ball through a hoop. Okay, they gave them these challenges, and they said to incentivize their performance, they gave them three levels of rewards, okay? So if you did pretty well, you got a small monetary reward. If you did medium well, you got a medium monetary reward. And if you did really well, if you were one of the top performers, you got a large cash prize, okay? We've seen this movie before. This is essentially a typical motivation scheme within organisations. Right? We reward the very top performers. We ignore the low performers. And the folks kind of in the middle, okay, you get a little bit. So what happens? They do the test. They have these incentives, here's what they found out. One. As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected. The higher the pay, the better their performance. Okay, that makes sense. But here's what happens. But once the task calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. This is strange right. A larger reward led to poorer performance. How can that possibly be? Now what's interesting about this is that these folks here who did this are all economists, two at MIT, one at the University of Chicago, one at Carnegie Melon, okay. The top tier of the economics profession and they're reaching this conclusion that seems contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics. Which is the higher the reward, the better the performance. But they're saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill, it's the other way around. Which seems like the idea that that these rewards don't work that way seems vaguely left wing and socialist doesn't it. It's kind of this kind of weird socialist conspiracy. For those of you who have those kind of conspiracy theories, I want to point out the notoriously left-wing socialist group that financed the research, the Federal Reserve Bank. So this is the mainstream of the mainstream coming to a conclusion that's quite surprising. It seems to defy the laws of behavioral physics. So this is strange. It's a strange finding. So what to they do? They say, this is freaky. Let's go test it somewhere else. Maybe that $50.00 or $60.00 prize isn't sufficiently motivating for an MIT student. So let's go to a place where $50.00 is actually more significant relatively. All right. So let's take the experiment, we're going to go to Madurai India, rural India where $50, $60, whatever the number was, is actually a significant sum of money. So they replicated the experiment in India roughly as follows. Small rewards, to the equivalent of two week's salary. I'm sorry. Small performance, low performance, two week's salary, medium performance, about a month's salary. High performance, about two months salary. Okay, so there's a real good incentive. So, you're going to get a different result here. Well, what happened though was that the people offered the medium reward did no better than the people offered the small reward. But this time around, people offered the top reward. They did worst of all. Higher incentives led to worse performance. What's interesting about this is it actually isn't all that anomalous. This has been replicated over and over and over again by psychologists, by to some extent by by sociologists, and by economists. Over and over and over again. For simple straightforward tasks, those kinds of incentives, if you do this then you get that. They're great. For tasks that are algorithmic, set of rules where you have to just follow along and get a right answer, if then rewards, carrots and sticks, outstanding. But when the task gets more complicated, when it requires some conceptual creative thinking those kinds of motivators demonstrably don't work. >> As you just saw, research has shown that people do not necessarily perform better and can in fact perform worse when they are given larger rewards. This is particularly true for tasks that involve cognitive and creative thinking, the kind of jobs that you and I have. There's a very good reason why this pressure to perform comes in the way of success. The stress that the desire for superiority puts on you takes away some of your brain's capacity. And this in turn lowers your productivity in intellectual tasks. I recently had the pleasure of talking to Dan Ariely himself. I put myself and him in a bit of a spot actually. By asking him a rather direct question. I asked him what he thought would happen to my Course Setter's course, this course that you are currently taking, if I made it my objective to beat his Course Setter's course? As you may know, Dan offered a hugely popular Course Setter's course called, A Beginners Guide to Irrational Behavior. I asked Dan what he thought would happen if my goal was to attract more students than he did, and I wanted to get even better ratings than he got. Would this goal improve my performance? Or would it actually worsen my performance? This is what Dan had to say. Listen. >> Let's say this class, and let's say Course Setter's was a competition, which of course it's not, but let's say say you thought of Course Setter's as a competition. And you would say, okay, let me spend a bit more in animation, and let me do this, and let me innovate that, and if you have time to think about it, it probably would create some benefit. But if at the moment you're in front of the camera and you're recording something and you ask yourself there's a part of it was saying how much better is this than other courses? That would probably not do well. What you really want to do is be in a state of flow. When you're focusing 100% on the student, and how you're explaining things. And what is the process? And have you emphasized the right amount? And is it too fast or too slow? And I don't know about you, when I give a lecture, I always have like two levels. I have the level as I give the lecture and I have the level in which I gauge the audience and I think about is it the right speed? Am I emphasizing things? Do they understand? I look at their faces. Now,Course Setter's is a bit tough because you don't have the audience. So to some degree it's a hard mental exercise because, like right now, you're nodding at least, right? So I have the sense that we're on the same page. But Course Setter's you sit there in front of a camera, it's hard to know, you don't get any of the social cues about them understanding so, it's a harder mental exercise. So if even 15% of your capacity is occupied by thinking about, how is this on the Course Setter's a competition, it's not going to do well for you. >> As you just saw, Dan thinks that my desire to beat him may make me put in more effort and time into the animation and editing and things like that. But as far as my performance in making presentations is concerned, it will actually worsen it. Since part of my brain's capacity would be occupied by my desire to beat him. And so I wouldn't be able to focus on whether I'm communicating my content well. This explanation that the desire for superiority lowers performance by taking away some of our brains capacity explains why the pursuit of superiority wouldn't lower your performance in non-intellectual tasks, like boxing. If I wanted to box Dan, then I think my desire to beat him would not affect my performance, or other kinds of physical activity, like rowing or playing cricket. But in intellectual tasks, the need for superiority is almost definitely likely to lower your performance. Now, you may think that your own personal experience has been a little bit different. You may feel that your desire to perform better than other people actually makes you perform better. If so, you need to ask yourself whether it is your performance that improves under pressure, or is that you feel more motivated to work when you are under pressure? Because these are two very different things. Judging by findings from studies, it seems that the pressure to be the best may improve your motivation to do a job well, but will actually worsen how well you do the job. Here's Don Ariely again, explaining this in his own words, listen. >> If you and I were promised that in a year from now >> We will do a task, and we will be offered either small bonus or very huge bonus. If its a huge bonus, we might spend a lot of time practicing, right? So, the to extent when you're not under stress, and you're just thinking about the money and it might motivate you to show up, to exercise, to do things, but at the moment its not it's not clear it will do the effect. >> In other words, when it comes to motivating yourself to do something, the pressure to perform can be a good thing. It can light a fire under your backside. But when it comes to doing a good job at that task, you're not going to be better off by putting that pressure on yourself to beat others. So, where does this leave us? To me, it suggests that if you're able to find another way to motivate yourself to do work you'll probably be better off getting rid of the need for superiority. Since not only does it come in the way of your success and intellectual task, it also lowers your happiness levels as we saw in the last video. In the next few videos I'm going to discuss what this other alternative motivation might be. Until then, goodbye.